From Xico

Flu in Mexico: What's going on in our colonia here in the infamous state of Veracruz

Nothing much.  It's close to normal, though schools are closed and no one is kissing or shaking hands as far as I can tell.  Last night, our young neighbor come over to ask if we happened to have a bocacubierta, mouth cover, because her mother was going to a meeting.  We didn't.  It was necessary for admission to a women's meeting.  It turned out they were available at the meeting.  Today, Blanca and I drove into Coatepec to get the stitches taken out of her puppies belly following spaying (Tati is the cutest puppy around, or at least one of the cutest.)  Blanca said that she thought it was a good idea to wear the mouth covers at the meeting because there were visitors from outside the colonia and it was crowded.  She very clearly understood that they were to keep people from sneezing and coughing on each other much more than to protect the wearers from germs.  She thought all the measures were quite sensible and not a particular burden here because all the local shops and stands can stay open.

Her one complaint was that they'd been given tons of schoolwork to do at home.  One of the projects was to design a product and then to come up with a marketing campaign for it. She squinched her face.  It didn't sound like fun.  I told her I'd seen on Mex Files some pictures of decorated bocacubiertas. Below you can see a couple from the site Guanabee which I found via Mex Files:

 Maybe she could do a set of designer bocacubiertas, we thought.  We suspected she wouldn't be the only one.  In fact, there are already commercial sites.  Fox News offers a quick view of a bunch here.

I kind of like the home-made ones better. 

We both had heard that this weekend was a long one because of a holiday.  She thought the holiday might be the Fiesta of the Three Crosses.  The shrine where this is celebrated is right behind our neighbors house, but there's been no evidence of it being ready for a mass or a party or anything else.  Several activities have, in fact, been suspended, and she thought this might be one of them.

The funny thing is, Jim and I just heard that the holiday officially involved in the long weekend is Cinco de Mayo: the big drinking day in the US.  Here in our colonia, no one seems to pay attention to it.

Anyway, everyone here seems quite aware of the situation, and nobody seems the least bit panicky and no one is walking around with a mask.  Just careful.  And traffic in Coatepec seemed busy, busy, busy as usual.  And no one there was walking around with a mask on.
And no one knows anyone who is sick with flu-like symptoms.  And no one is terribly scared of the flu. Not that there aren't problems: diabetes, for one.  In the past few months, two people in our colonia in their forties died from complications of that disease.

Mexican Flu: Information on

Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) has a very good basic site with information including answers to a lot of frequently asked questions and links to a number of useful sites. The site is in Spanish, but it is not difficult, so if you can read a bit of Spanish you should be able to use it.

Here is a link to a Google Earth map of the world which gives some idea of the outbreak.

Mexican Flu: The NAFTA-Industrial Agriculture Context

Laura Carlsen of Americas Program makes the connections between  industrial agriculture, NAFTA and neoliberal economics, Smithfield Foods, the spread of the virus and why it showed first and with strength in Mexico City here.  Well-documented.

Mexican Flu: The NAFTA-Industrial Agriculture Context

Laura Carlsen of Americas Program makes the connections between  industrial agriculture, NAFTA and neoliberal economics, Smithfield Foods, the spread of the virus and why it showed first and with strength in Mexico City here.  Well-documented.

Mexican Flu: Granjas Carroll: Did It All Start Here?

Stolen from El Universal, picture of pigs at Granjas Carroll.

From El Universal today, my translation.
Transnational pig production under suspicion
By Carlos Macías Richard

Where did the swine flue come from?  It's still not certain, but data is beginning to flow.  One clue leads to Perote, Veracruz.

The current epiemic which has changed the lives of all the inhabitants of the country will certainly bring together many stories and actors, many personal and family dramas which emerged suddenly and incomprehensibly.  However, there are too many threads with which to begin to reconstruct calmly (for the purposes of informing society) the origin and evolution of the epidemic.  The following will be  perhaps a small part of the puzzle which we are beginning to put together.

Smithfield is the most important global  company in the processing of food products derived from pork.  In its prime, it was the first company of its kind to obtain environmental certification ISO 14001, in its  its operations as pork producers and processors.  The company's motto is designed to create confidence:  Good Food Responsibly.

Smithfield had its beginnings in 1936 when Joseph Luter built a small ham and bacon packaging plant in Smithfield, Virginia.  But its current global manifestation dates from 1999 when it acquired its competitor, Carroll's Foods (in order to create Smithfield Foods) and became the rival of the no less omnipresent company Tyson's.

The global company Smithfield is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SFD.. It also appears on NASDAQ .Its stock fell Monday a little more than ten percent in one day when Tyson also fell nine percent.  Remember that it is the practice of investors to buy stock based on rumor and sell based on news.
Smithfield, now owner of Carroll Foods, is the co-owner of granja Carroll, in the valley of Perote.  It's been mentioned a lot that granja Carroll owns the most technologically advanced facilities in the country for raising pork.   The Mexican associates of Smithfield at Granjas Carraoll are not minor businesses either.  They are the stockholders of Agroindustrias Unidas de Mexico, one of the major producers and exporters of Mexican coffee (Veracruz and Chiapas).

Granja Carroll has been continuously challenged by the inhabitants of the adjoining area since at least 2007 because of its inadequate management of wastes.  The most recent expansion of  processing operationswas announced in Veracruz in December, 2007. In October 2008 in order to honor its environmental commitment, Granja Carroll donated to the governor of the state 500,000 pesos to support the campaign called Faithful to the Forests [FidelidadForestal] (in Veracruz, ...the program was commonly called Fidel. [Fidel is the name of the governor].  In January 2008, the governor inaugurated the meat processor and incinerator at Granjas Carroll.

The acute respiratory problems of many inhabitants of the valley of Perote began during the second part of March 2009.  It appears to us a good idea to raise the fundamental questions we all have.

1. The health authorities of Veracruz acted with unaccustomed speed to analyse the results of the condition found among the population (in the town of Las Glorias) at the end of March.  Even more, those same authorities acted with incredible speed to alleviate and eliminate the illness in the population.

T2.  The expert James Wilson (consultant for the US business Veratec which deals with  with biotechnological alerts) appeared also, at an early date....(This doesn't have to do with just any consultant; to understand the importance of Wilson, you should know that he is one of the scientists accustomed to appear before the committee on internal security of the US Congress.) Wilson submitted the lab results on the infectious agent in the population [in Las Glorias] around the 30th of March.  A short time after this investigation in Mexico and in the US, Veratec alerted the World Health Organizaton, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US and the international Red Cross about the outbreak (Veratect did not say whether it alerted the government of Mexico).  Some unsettling questions are: Did Veratec make the government of Veracruz or the national government of Mexico aware of the relevance of this finding?  If not, why not?  Perhaps the analysis of Veratec and Wilson  was ordered and sent only to granja Carroll and not to the government of Veracruz?  Perhaps the results were sought and used mainly by the govrnment, and also for the attention and treatment of the sick?

3. Since from December, 2005 to January, 2009, at least twelve isolated cases of swine flu had appeared in the US according to the CDC,  there are a variety of public health documents on line which warn that the subtype A of H1N1 (swine flu) is notably only sensitive to treatment with sanamivir or oseltamivir and not with the traditional medicines used with that subtype of influenza A (amantadine and rimantadince).

4.  Very probably the owners and global directors of Smithfield, shareholders of granja Carroll, also know the latent public health risk, so... they always have at hand, in the same offices of the Veracruz farm, large quantities of boxes of ten capsules of the miraculous oseltamivir (that is to say, Tamiflú....specifically to provide individual doses of five days every twelve hours). Owing to the same medical experience treating patients in the US, the few patients who appeared in Texas and California at the end of March and beginning of April of this year were treated promptly and recovered.

5.  The population of Las Glorias got sick....and got better at the beginning of April.. The 2nd of April (and making use of some lab results Wilson submitted?) the secretary of health of Veracruz, Manuel Lila de Arce said:  "It is not an epidemic, it is not influenza, the farms were fumigated because while we don't have problems with rodents and insects now, we treat to avoid any proliferation of another illness which strictly speaking is not  this one" (which?) However, he agreed that they ought to establish and maintain for some days a public health fence [I think his means quarantine].  (Perhaps this was sufficient?) The quarantine took place owing to the fact that "about 30 percent of the roughly 2500 inhabitants" had symptoms of respiratory infections."

6.  The state government has indicated that since April 23, among the sick in Las Glorias only one five year old child tested positive for swine flu and that he recuperated withouth problems.  Yet this past weekend, the governor visited the child at his house to show publically that there was no evidence of swine flu in the state.  The 26th of April, Smithfield appeared pressured to put on its global web page that "none of the workers or the animals of granja Carroll had any illness associated with swine flu."

The questions are timely. What medicine did the government give to the child who had swine flu, and what medicine did it give to the rest of the people of Las Glorias presenting respiratory symptoms (resfriado)?  Who recommended to the state government to use this medicine (a medicine so effective, and which was not used with patients with similar symptoms in Oaxaca, Mexico City and San Luis Potois?)  What medicine is this giant, jealous global pig production business accustomed to keep on hand in its medicine cabinet and to offer and administer to its employees in case of emergency?

The answer, probably, is part of a skein of explanations with many threads which will ....which will arrive [as news] at Nasdaq.

Carlos Macías Richard is a full time researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS)

Mexican Flu: Granjas Carroll

Since they've been in the news lately, here's a link to the (in)famous Granjas Carroll.  They have a nice, feel-good webpage which says, among other thing that Granjas Carroll is a "socially responsible business:

Granjas Carroll de Mexico is a Mexican business owned by two companies: Agroinustrias Unidas de Mexico, which has produced and marketed cotton, food oils, coffee and cocoa.  The North American associate, Smithfield, is a world leader in pork production and has factories in France, Spain, Romania, the US and Mexico.

In 1994 we opened our first specialized pig "farm" in the Valley of Perote.  Since then we have built and are operating 16 "farms" with a total of 566,000 [vientres?] on the border between the states of Veracruz and Puebla.

In a sustainable manner, we have consolidated our presence in the domestic market as the principal producer of pigs in Mexico, contributing annually 10% of national pork producton, equal to a million heads.

Makng use of scientific research, available technology, our experience, andinnovation, GCM continually improves its animal husbandry practices resulting in excellent quality meat produced susainably and competitively.

Flu in Mexico: Mexico is handling things well

Excellent commentary from The Mex Files clarifying Mexico's status as a middle-class country with a good public health system and some problems not so different from ummm the US's.  I'd like to mention here that Susan Collins, Republican Senator from Maine, was responsible for stripping funding for pandemic preparedness from the US stimulus bill.  See this article  in The Huffington Post for details.  The article (and I) wonder just how Republicans couldn't have understood that a pandemic might  affect the  economy....let alone that preparation for one would provide jobs.

Flu in Mexico: More on the Veracruz connection

A link to a post in the Huffington Post by David Kirby on the origins.  I found it at Mex Files.  It cites the Secretary of Health attributing the first case to a four-year-old boy in La Gloria, Perote, in April. This doesn't clarify much, however.

Note the article talks of the long-term complaints of people in the area of La Granja Carroll.  I remember maybe two years ago we went to plant trees on Perote with a bunch of people that included an official from the department of sanitation in Xalapa.  He mentioned problems of water pollution from Granjas Carroll, and dismay at the consequences. 

Maybe people will start looking seriously at consequences of industrial farming practices. Whether or not the flu is traced directly to Granjas Carroll or not, there are significant pollution and animal treatment issues that we need to address.

Flu in Mexico: Has it been in Veracruz longer than we knew?

From El Universal today.  My translation

They've Known Since December of Infection in Perote

By Edgar Avila, correspondent
Tuesday 28 April 2009

From December 2008 to March of this year, 500 people in the community La Gloria in the municipality of Perote, presented with respiratory illnesses. [remember, this was flue season so in and of itself, this is not unusual, EKB].  Among the cases there wewre two deaths from "pneumonia," the subdirector of Prevention and Control of Diseases of SSA, Alexjandar Escobar Mesa, said at confirming the outbreak of respiratory diseases in the area.

 

However, Governor Fidel Herrar Beltran denied that in the mountainous region of Perote the outbreak of swine flu affecting the country began. He said that the illness was located in Asia.

 

In a message from the state capitol, he declared that swine flu started in Asia and for this reason it is not related to the agricultural activity in the region of Perote where there are industrial producers of pork [This seems definitely not to be a majority view here at this time. EKB].

 

"(The virus) is located in Asia, in China; from there it arrived, via travelers to North America and surely to Mexico City and the state of Mexico.  It is not associated with the development of agricultural industry in the valley of Perote," he insisted, and he denied that swine flu had a relation with the business, Carroll  Farms, which operates in Perote. 

 

In this regard, Carroll Farms said that none of its workers, nor any of the more than five hundred thousand pigs there had influenza.

 

The company, which operates in the states of Puebla and Veracruz, emphasized that it had not registered any outbreaks of swine flu in any of its workers nor in [any of the pigs [vientres, cerdos] in development.

 

The official text recalls that the virus found in people is not associated with raising pork, that is to say, there has been no contact with pigs at any time, "and that it was concluded that the contact has been from human to human."

 

In this matter, the official from the Department of Agriculture...in Perote, Octavio Legarreta, indicated that over the weekend he supervised the valley of Perote with special attention to La Gloria.  No case of pigs with any respiratory symptom associated with swine flu.

 

Nevertheless, Escobar Mesa confirmed an outbreak of "respiratory illnesses" in this region.  Of the five hundred affected, two people presented with flu, one of them with swine flu, which was the first case in the area, and it was reported this past Sunday.

"We have only found two cases of flu, one of type A and one of type b," he declared.

Mexican Flu: Influenza and Scientific Capacities in Mexico

An opinion piece by Javier Flores in today's La Jornada. My translation.

In spite of the tone of Felipe Calderón's message, broadcast yesterday, designed to reassure everyone (which seems to me the correct thing to do, in comparison with the first version which generated panic), we are still not in the land of good news.  The number of new flu cases in our country has not declined and the data is not clear, while reports about people infected in the US, Canada and some European nations show that the infection by the swine flu virus is on the verge of taking on pandemic proportions.

One question arising from this uncertainty is: how did this public health problem arise?  Today, people outside Mexico think the origin is Mexico.  This would signify that the mutation of the virus of swine flu occured here, transmitting itself initially among people in our country, and from here, disseminating itself to the world.  But this is not necessarily true.  This is an excessive simplification.  Globalization, which involves an exchange of multitudes of people and of merchandise, makes it hard to decide precisely the origins of an epidemic. This unknown will be resolved in the medium and long term by means of studies aimed to answer questions about the precise nature of the virus, which now appears to be confirmed as a mutation of A/H1N1, one of the most common viruses in pork production plants in North America.  But unfortunately, we here in Mexico are too far away to particpate in these studies.

In Calderón's message, attention was called to a commtment: in the next 73 hours, he said, the country will have within its borders specialized laboratories to confirm to type of virus present in cases of swine flu.  Earlier he affirmed something else very interesting [not to say puzzling]: he said that originally Mexican specialists had detected a viral agent, but that it was not confirmed by the most advanced laboratories of Canada and the United States.  I have no doubt that Mexico has the most advanced scientists with the ability to undertake these studies, since I know just how goodMexican scientists are.  But what is clear is that we are trying to solve a problem of insufficiencies which has lasted a number of decades for lack of attention, and it includes the disdain of the government towards scientific and technological activity, which, as we can see, has made us completely dependent on foreigners although we face probelms which threaten the lives of many Mexicans.

Vaccines are another problem.  To produce a vaccine is no simple job.  It implies being able to count on many sophisticated scientific and technical capacity.  At present, foreign pharmaceutical laboratories benefit from the lack of knowledge in developing nations.  As a consequence, the costs of prevention are rising higher, to the extent that they now compete with the costs of specialized hospitals.  Facing the epidemic of flu which afflicts us, we just stand there with our hands in our pockets hoping that by some miracle a new vaccine specifically directed against this illness will emerge. In other articles, I have proposed the creation of projects involving international cooperation which would bring together  academies of science and medicine with their homologues in nations which share our problems, in particular in the region of Latin America, with the purpose of producing our own vaccines.  It would also be useful for the production of antiviral medications.

I believe one of the great lessons of this swine flu epiemic is that we were caught with our pants down.  We have great abilities in the area of medicine.  We  have a good system of epidemiological vigilance and a system of public health of the first rank, constructed with great effort over many years.  But the great weaknes we show in scientific and technological areas makes us dependent on foreign countries whose experts will have the last word on the origin of this pandemic and how to prevent one in the future.